Mercado do peixe

Some of you have written expressing concern about our health and if we are eating all right. I want to assure you that since we arrived in Mozambique our only problem with food has been too few meal opportunities each day. Hung has taken to planning our next day's meals while we are enjoying a meal the day before. Now that we are at our last day in Maputo (its gone so fast!), and are about to go back to the land of the English colonial heritage, we are treasuring each meal.

Yesterday, after visiting a large sprawling market distinguished for its many stalls with curandera (traditional medecine) offerings - think monkey paws, dried starfish and lots of bark, colored yarn, and powders - we caught a chapas back across town and wandered in the vague direction of the fish market. We had heard that it was a good place to purchase fresh seafood and that the small restaurants there would gladly cook up whatever you had purchased. When we finally arrived (on the late side of the lunch siesta), we were overwhelmed with the variety and volume of fresh local sea material: tons of fresh fish, big & small along with outrageously large tiger prawns, lobsters, squid, gorgeous crabs of all sizes, about 6 or 7 different kinds of clams, and even oysters. Once we got a handle on how things were sold (some by the kg - pronounced "cage", and some by the can) and sussed out who was ridiculously overcharging and who wasn't (a constant challenge), we headed off with a large boisterous bodybuilder of a crab, a can+ of long slender pencil size clams and a medium-sized rockfish. They were all nicely prepared and, needless to say, we didn't need dinner.

Tonight we plan to return to a really excellent restaurant "La Marisquiera" for their Prato do Pato Maputo (our name) ...roasted duck, their special on Friday evening.

Tomorrow we head to Johannesburg.